Competitive intelligence, as it relates to pricing, has been an important aspect of the retail business for decades. Today, consumers have tools that allow them to compare prices across thousands of retailers in seconds.
To be competitive, retailers today must: i) know who their competitors are, ii) know how much their competitors are charging for the goods that they carry, and iii) be able to act on this information.
Many retailers carry a very large number of products on their catalog, often times in excess of 100,000 different stock keeping units (SKUs) associated with different products. Each SKU is often sold by many different competitors at different prices. Competitors may change their prices for products at any time, which makes it even more difficult to determine the pricing of the products at different retailers.
Because of the large number of retailers selling goods online, it can be important that retailers know who their relevant competitors are; not only at the store level, but also at the “product group” level. “Product group,” in this case, can be defined as a group of SKUs or other product identifiers. A “product group” can be a product category (e.g., digital cameras), a brand (e.g., Canon® products), or any pre-defined product group (e.g., high-end Canon® digital cameras).